Big Box Retailer’s Holiday Shopping Campaign: A Foot Traffic Analysis

I would like to share with you today an example of Polaris’ capabilities to measure and investigate foot traffic . I will do so by analyzing a campaign which a leading big box retailer ran on the Polaris Realtime DSP platform prior to and during the holiday season.

Some background before we start: The campaign motivated shoppers to hurry and get savings. In addition to the ongoing campaign, the client activated occasional ad-hoc targeted messaging (for example: prior to and during Black Friday). The campaign reached more than 10M unique users nationwide. In order to measure campaign effectiveness, we used a control group of more than 3M unique users with the exact same profile, who visited the retailer’s store and were not exposed to the retailers’ mobile campaign.

Key results and takeaway from the chart above: (marked in blue: exposed group, red: control group)

Visitation Volume: The retailer was able to generate an impressive 20% lift in foot traffic to its stores.

Visitation Patterns – Before or During Holiday Traffic: The retailer not only increased the total number of visits but also increased pre-holiday traffic. This is important both for the customers, who received better shopping experiences and for the retailer who was able to slightly mitigate overhead costs associated with peak traffic during the holiday season.

Next, let us see some examples of the deep dive in order to have a better understanding of the retailer’s consumer demographics:

Household Income (HHI), exposed group marked in blue / control group marked in red: The exposed group over indexes a lower HHI. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the “hurry and get savings” creative message since it appeals to price sensitive shoppers who typically represent a lower HHI. In order to complete this picture, it is noticeable that the control group (shoppers who visited the stores, with the same profile, but were not exposed to the retailers’ ad) over indexes towards a higher HHI since they were not the prime prospects of this specific campaign.

Gender: Female Shoppers (exposed) over indexed the control group by 3pts. This is a fact worth mentioning mainly because from a shopper marketing perspective, female shoppers are the target audience.

To conclude, in this manner, we provided a small glimpse of the actionable insights that can be generated from a foot traffic analysis by taking a deeper dive into the visitation trends and demographics of the exposed and unexposed groups.

The polaris&me blog is an area where Ubimo team members and our clients can share insights and use cases demonstrating the power of Polaris.